Fun with Hexaflexagons

Another video from Vi Hart has left me fumbling around with paper and pens for a much larger amount of time than I had anticipated. In her latest creation, she introduces us to hexaflexagons. Go on, check it out!

With multiple hidden sides and nifty fold away sections, these strange, flexible hexagons immediately caught my attention as perfect secret message holders! Once I figured out how to make a hexaflexagon, I spent the rest of the day intermittently playing with (aka destroying) them and figuring out how they work.

Vi will be posting another hexaflexagon video next week (see the description of her video to see why October is a special month for hexaflexagons), but in the mean time, these are the ones I made. Since there are so many sides to work with, I was able to fit an entire Neil deGrasse Tyson quote into one of them.

Like this:

Katy is a college student in North Carolina. She loves insects, astronomy, and pretty much anything related to science. Katy spends a lot of her time making messes with watercolors and might be in love with a robot named GLaDOS. Find her on twitter: @KatyAnnC. She also has a blog called Katy's Notebook.

4 Comments

I first got introduced to flexagons back in grade school, well before I knew who Martin Gardner was. Ours tended to be larger, because the stationery stores sold adding-machine tape, which made great flexagon raw material. Don’t know if you can still find that stuff in the office stores anymore.

Our goal was always to decorate the faces with a pattern that looked equally good in either configuration.